Election 2025: A tale of two South Australian seats Liberals must win, but could lose both

Peter Dutton’s hopes of a Nicolle Flint comeback in the must-win South Australian seat of Boothby risk being cancelled out by a shock loss in Sturt, the former stronghold of moderate powerbroker Christopher Pyne.

Peter Dutton with the Liberal candidate for the must-win South Australian seat of Boothby, Nicolle Flint. Picture: Matt Turner.

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Peter Dutton’s hopes of a Nicolle Flint comeback in the must-win South Australian seat of Boothby risk being cancelled out by a shock loss in Sturt, the former stronghold of moderate powerbroker Christopher Pyne.

While Ms Flint has run a highly energetic campaign for more than 12 months in Boothby, the Liberal member for Sturt, James Stevens, is locked in a risky and unpredictable three-way tussle against prominent Labor, Greens and teal opponents, all of them women.

The importance of Sturt to both parties was highlighted by both leaders visiting the electorate, which Mr Stevens holds with a margin of just 0.5 per cent, on Thursday.

Within the fractious SA Liberal division there are already dark mutterings that the moderate Mr Stevens and his team were too slow out of the blocks up against three strong female candidates including veteran four-time Greens candidate Katie McCusker.

Ms McCusker ran for Sturt at the 2022 federal election when many traditionally Liberal eastern suburbs booths returned a Green vote of as much as 30 per cent.

She also polled strongly in the middle class enclaves of Norwood and Beulah Park at last year’s Dunstan by-election caused by the snap departure of former SA premier Steven Marshall, her strong showing of 20 per cent helping Labor to a historic win in the Liberal-held seat.

The Liberals’ hopes that this Green surge was a one-off fuelled by the unpopularity of Scott Morrison may be forlorn, with internal and external polling showing the Greens vote still holding up.

The ability of the Liberals to make inroads in SA may also be hampered by the popularity of Premier Peter Malinauskas. On his many trips to SA, the biggest of which this year was the $1.8bn rescue of the Whyalla steelworks, Anthony Albanese has always been flanked by the Premier.

Some federal Labor candidates have used images of Mr Malinauskas rather than Mr Albanese in their campaign material in a state where the most recent Newspoll put Labor ahead of the Liberals 55 to 45, the highest lead for Labor in any state.

The result in Sturt will hinge on the flow of preferences between Ms McCusker, Labor candidate Claire Clutterham and teal candidate Verity Cooper, who is backed by Climate 200.

“It is all hard to read but in a way we are more concerned about Sturt than Boothby,” one Liberal figure confided to The Australian.

“James has had three years to get ready for this. It’s not like he didn’t have plenty of warning. (Christopher) Pyne always ran from a position of complete paranoia and was convinced he was going to lose. ”

Both Liberal and Labor strategists have told The Australian they believe a Liberal victory in Boothby is more likely than in Sturt, despite Boothby being held by Labor’s Louise Miller-Frost on a bigger margin of 3.3 per cent.

Ms Flint’s campaign is being helped by two factors. The first is high recognition, with many ­voters believing she is still the local member having held the seat for two terms from 2016 to her ­retirement from politics at the 2022 election.

She also enjoys a significant sympathy vote for the brutal manner in which she quit politics, not just due to her health battle with endometriosis, but exhausted after a bruising 2019 campaign where she was hounded by GetUp! and the unions, with her office repeatedly vandalised.

Unlike in Sturt, Ms Flint is not facing a teal candidate in Boothby, where former Adelaide Writers Week director Jo Dyer failed to make inroads for the teals at the 2023 poll.

Despite being from opposite sides of the Liberal divide, the moderate Mr Stevens and conservative Ms Flint have worked productively together and held a joint fundraiser at the Arkaba Hotel last year, which was addressed by John Howard.

At that lunch, Mr Stevens said presciently: “We will not form government if we do not win Sturt and Boothby.”

The nightmare scenario for the Liberals is that neither happens and the party also fails to make inroads in seats such as Spence, the working class northern suburban electorate which returned the highest No vote in the land in the voice referendum in 2023.

The 10 per cent Labor seat has been visited by former prime minister Tony Abbott during the campaign and is held up as a potential gain if Mr Dutton’s conservative messaging resonates effectively with blue collar voters.

Privately, however, neither side of politics believes it is realistically in play. Labor believes Mr Dutton’s bungling of his work-from-home policy during the campaign will be a negative with the many middle class female voters in both Sturt and Boothby.

Ms Miller-Frost told The Australian she believed Labor had run a positive campaign and sold a good message as to how it would protect services and help families.

“At the end of the day, a vote for Nicolle Flint is a vote for Peter Dutton and his promise to cut – a man who has opposed cost-of-­living relief, has no credible climate policy, won’t say how he’ll pay for his nuclear reactors, and has largely ignored SA during the campaign,” she said.

“The PM has been to Adelaide a number of times. I was particularly pleased to secure Labor’s pledge of $150m for the Flinders HealthCARE Centre which will deliver more allied health appointments and train more health workers for our community.

“What has also become increasingly clear through my conversations is that the people of Boothby don’t think Peter Dutton is fit to be Australia’s prime minister; they’re particularly concerned over backflips on key policies like banning work from home and they don’t believe he can be trusted.

“It is the honour of my life to be the member for Boothby and actually deliver projects for my community which have been talked about for years, including removing level crossings and getting more beds open at Flinders Medical Centre. What is clear for voters across Boothby today is that a vote for Nicolle Flint is a vote for Peter Dutton and his cuts.”

Ms Flint said the Liberals had run a much more community-­focused campaign, with Labor failing to match their promises on transport and community sport ­issues in Boothby.

She said she was personally hopeful of making a comeback after her health challenges and hoped the community would give her a third chance in the seat.

“Aside from my miracle health breakthrough my motivation for re-contesting Boothby is to do my part to change the government to get Australia back on track,” Ms Flint told The Australian.

“I have never seen our local residents and small businesses in such financial distress as they are under the Albanese Labor government. The Liberal Party has a clear plan to address this, and to put money back into people’s pockets as fast as possible through immediate relief at the petrol pump, $1200 income tax assistance, keeping more gas here in Australia to bring power prices down, slowing immigration, addressing the housing crisis and getting Labor’s inflation under control.

“We have committed to the $150m Flinders University Centre of Health, which builds on our local commitment to health when we saved the Repat Hospital precinct which Labor cruelly closed.

“There is a clear choice for our local community between our positive plan that will make important changes to actually fix the cost-of-living crisis, and Labor who are using taxpayers’ money for handouts rather than correcting the problems they have caused.

“The situation is similar on the ground in our community. I have spent the last 12 months making myself available to listen to everyone.”